Eco Agro Tourism and Organic Holidays By Victor Ananias / Bugday ...

has been the only ecological and agricultural tourism scheme at the national level
and represented internationally as well since 2004.
Bugday Association’s vision is a whole humanity consisting of ecologically and
socially sustainable lifestyles. To serve that, Bugday as a social movement has
started to work 18 years ago on building sustainable human activities, support the
existing good examples and network among all to enhance free flow of knowledge
and experience.
In 2003 Buğday has started to work on its farm visits, consumer educations at site
and volunteer program’s in a well organized whole system at a sustainable-organic
farm network. With this respect TaTuTa farm visits and volunteers program was
established, which also led the organization to become member of ECEAT and
WWOOF. TaTuTa has 70 farms in different regions of Turkey that receive Tourist
and/or volunteers as hosts. They are checked, trained, supported and advertised by
Bugday Association. Bugday does all these on volunteer basis, finds donors for its
expenses. Reservations are made by another partner since 2006, Genctur, which is
a youth tour organizer company in Turkey. TaTuTa receives a growing number of
tourists and volunteers from Turkey and other countries.
3- Funding in Ecological and Sustainable Tourism
Before a baby is born, there has to be a lot of love, care, good intentions and
plans among the potential partners. Money neither helps during the pregnancy nor in
the lifetime of the born person, if you do not have these. All strong - successful social
movements have been developed from civil, strongly motivated, visionary people’s
intentions, activities and devotion.
There is a lot of money available at many resources like national and international
funds like Dutch Matra Fund, UNDP, GEF SGP, EU, World Bank, Soros Foundation,
etc. The only delicate part is when money and funding starts to be the dominatingmotivating
prior tool there may start some loss of vision and values, corruption,
handouts and all other negative effects. The main tool to eliminate the negative
impacts of money and finances is to have a strong vision that includes and describes
the well being of all possible stakeholders, parties affected.
Today it looks impossible to escape from using money as an exchange tool but with
creative systems we can still do a lot. For instance Turkish TaTuTa host families in
Turkey exchange some of the organic products that they do not produce themselves
to consume and serve their guests
What we can be done at international sustainable tourism schemes is that with the
help of volunteer networks, different standards at different parts of the world can be
described and adopted in order to give chance for every stakeholder to compete, get
enough interest in a possibly more equal way. That is of course just one of the many
good ideas that need to be planned, worked on and realized by satisfactory
participation in order to generate enough funding into the sustainable tourism
activities all over the world.
4- Future of Eco Agro Tourism